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And Japan is still using Shift-JIS...

by Grue3 7y ago

shpx 7y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification Imagiŋe if all the "n"s became "ŋ" if you accideŋtally used the Helvetica British foŋt instead of Helvetica Americaŋ oŋ your website.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  Han unification is a bit of a mess, but you can fix it with lang attributes or the equivalent ("Language" selection in office document formats, for example). You don't need to fake things with a custom font.
  - yorwba 7y ago
    Except those are all application-specific and if you're the one writing the application, rendering different languages differently still seems to require messing around with fonts. (Or embedding an HTML renderer that does the messing for you.) I'm not sure whether there's any solution for OS-level strings that don't support changing the font (e.g. window titles, application names) beyond requiring the user to pick one language for their system and ignore all others.
    - geofft 7y ago
      Do variation selectors solve this problem? i.e., is there some way for me to include a variation selector in a filename or terminal output or something and have things render right?
      - yorwba 7y ago
        I think variation selectors are intended for the case where even knowing the language is not enough to select the correct glyph, e.g. because they have been unified in a national standard despite different variants remaining in use. If one of those variants happens to be used in another country, you could of course use it to fix at least some cases, but I don't think all unified characters have a selector for each of their country-specific variants. Even if they did, the Ideographic Variation Database [1] doesn't exactly make it easy to use variation selectors for that purpose, because you only get an example demonstrating what the glyphs should look like. To find out which glyph (and hence variation selector) to use for a given language, you'd need an additional database. [1] https://unicode.org/ivd/data/2017-12-12/ https://unicode.org/ivd/data/2017-12-12/

And Japan is still using Shift-JIS...

by Grue3 7y ago

And Japan is still using Shift-JIS...

shpx 7y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification Imagiŋe if all the "n"s became "ŋ" if you accideŋtally used the Helvetica British foŋt instead of Helvetica Americaŋ oŋ your website.

zozbot234 7y ago
Han unification is a bit of a mess, but you can fix it with lang attributes or the equivalent ("Language" selection in office document formats, for example). You don't need to fake things with a custom font.
- yorwba 7y ago
  Except those are all application-specific and if you're the one writing the application, rendering different languages differently still seems to require messing around with fonts. (Or embedding an HTML renderer that does the messing for you.) I'm not sure whether there's any solution for OS-level strings that don't support changing the font (e.g. window titles, application names) beyond requiring the user to pick one language for their system and ignore all others.
  - geofft 7y ago
    Do variation selectors solve this problem? i.e., is there some way for me to include a variation selector in a filename or terminal output or something and have things render right?
    - yorwba 7y ago
      I think variation selectors are intended for the case where even knowing the language is not enough to select the correct glyph, e.g. because they have been unified in a national standard despite different variants remaining in use. If one of those variants happens to be used in another country, you could of course use it to fix at least some cases, but I don't think all unified characters have a selector for each of their country-specific variants. Even if they did, the Ideographic Variation Database [1] doesn't exactly make it easy to use variation selectors for that purpose, because you only get an example demonstrating what the glyphs should look like. To find out which glyph (and hence variation selector) to use for a given language, you'd need an additional database. [1] https://unicode.org/ivd/data/2017-12-12/ https://unicode.org/ivd/data/2017-12-12/